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by onion2k
1152 days ago
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you're an incompetent programmer The problem with this line of reasoning, eg "if you write slow code you're incompetent", is that it applies to everything that programmers do - if you write slow code you're incompetent, if you write buggy code you're incompetent, if you write undocumented code you're incompetent, if you write untested code you're incompetent, if you write code slowly you're incompetent, if you write code that doesn't fulfil all the requirements perfectly you're incompetent, and so on for each and every measure someone dreams up to measure how good code is. You'll very quickly find there are no competent developers. |
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The other things are just proxies for the real measures, that people made up, and in fact are often harmful to the main goal. Like "documenting code" and "writing tests" a lot of the time are just cargo culting to make people feel like they're being responsible and following "best practices" without actually improving the measures that matter. I think that the other unlisted metrics in your "every measure someone dreams up..." are likely to fall under this category.
There isn't an infinite number of possible measures like you're suggesting, there's a finite number and a rather small number at that. You can definitely be really good or really bad at quickly shipping performant bug-free code that does its job. The problem in this debate is that one side is completely ignoring one of these measures, and trying to claim that it's because they have to prioritize the other ones, and that this is just an inevitable tradeoff, rather than that we lack the skill as an industry to do all of these things at an acceptable level. Being a good programmer may involve more axes than being a good chess player, but I think the claim that there are so many axes that it negates the existence of programming competence reductios to absurdum pretty quickly.